There's one line on Common's new album, Finding Forever, that keeps sticking with me, and it comes right about in the middle, on "Southside": "Back in '94 they called me Chi-town's Nas." It's accurate in more ways than the idea that Resurrection is the Midwest's Illmatic: Both MCs have spent the past 13 years struggling with artistic detours, shifting audiences, and diminishing returns, Nas taking the cash-in route with the commercial-skewing (and subsequently underrated) It Was Written while Common's street-level bohemianism gradually and inadvertently narrowcasted him towards an audience of, as he infamously put it, "coffee shop chicks and white dudes." Both of them came back later in their careers with fires lit under their asses, though there's a difference between being called out by Jay-Z for being washed-up and being called out by your fans for turning into a flat-out freak (see: Electric Circus).
Seeing as how Be was a commercial, critical, and fanbase success that restored Common's rep, it's weird that its successor follows its winning formula to the letter yet somehow sounds comparatively lead-footed and tired. Although the Kanye West partnership that flourished in Common's 2005 return to form felt like something that could reap a lot of creative dividends over the course of subsequent albums, Finding Forever is a turn toward going through the motions, weighed down by an adult-contemporary atmosphere that mistakes fatigue for relaxation. There's screw albums with more liveliness than this.
Common may not have gotten more confident as he's matured-- he didn't really need to, already having developed an authoritative voice by age 22, and at 35 he's still as comfortable taking the pulpit as any MC his age-- but his street wisdom and his man-of-the-people rhetoric have developed a cynical tone that too often turns his tales of humanistic living and tragedy into joyless scolding. The righteousness worked well on Be since Common tended to leave the self- out of it, and there's a few moments on Finding Forever that succeed for the same reason; his intricately delivered insights into the vicious cycle of ghetto life in "Black Maybe" ("We leanin' on a wall that ain't, that ain't stable/ It's hard to turn on the hood that made you/ To leave, be afraid to, the same streets that raised you can aid you") and his barbed fury on "Start the Show" ("With 12 monkeys on the stage it's hard to see who's a guerilla/ You was better as a drug dealer") don't just hit hard, they hit precisely. But the narrative in "Misunderstood" about the loosely defined street hustler and the college girl turned drug-addict stripper seem more distant than the more firsthand-feeling observations in Be's closing track "It's Your World", and the first verse of "The Game" has so many disconnected talking points (global warming, spoiled rich teenagers, black power, the greatness of Big Daddy Kane) over the course of 40 seconds that it feels like a suffocating avalanche of conscious-rap clichés.
And sometimes it gets borderline-Mencia ignorant: Describing white people's supposed unfamiliarity with day-to-day struggles on "The People" requires a lot more insight than claiming they prefer to "focus on dogs and yoga" (is that how Jeremy Piven lived on the set of Smokin' Aces?), and if the flirtation in "Break My Heart" was a real-life conversation, it'd probably wind up being mocked on Overheard in Chicago: "It was a dream day/ Met her on Spring Break/ Look like the type that be like 'no habla Ingles'/ She said 'you look like you rap, where's your bling-ay/ And your clothes are tight but you don't seem gay'/ I said 'naw, that's dude from N-Sync-ay.'" At least when he griped about black men dating white women, he tried reminding himself to go beyond the surface. And he didn't lace it with a series of warmed-over pop-culture wisecracks, either: Between the references to OK Go's treadmill video, the crazy astronaut lady, and gossip-rag celebrity couples (Kimora Lee and Russell Simmons, sure, but Ryan Phillippe and Reese Witherspoon?) on the Lily Allen-augmented "Drivin' Me Wild," he's more VH-1 than KRS-One.
But while it's easy to pick and choose the goofiest shit Common says on a record, the lyrics aren't necessarily what makes Finding Forever so tedious. Kanye West, who once again produces the majority of the album, has tried making a tribute to Common's Jay Dee-fueled Soulquarian-era sound, and he doesn't fit it well at all, managing half of its vibe and none of its energy. "Southside" features a guitar riff that sounds like a rote impersonation of the bugged-out synth on Donuts' "Da Factory"; "Forever Begins" relies too heavily on a washed-out supper-club piano and an obvious break from Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover"; and even the fairly close approximations-- particularly the 70s Hancock/Wonder soul-jazz of "The People" and "Break My Heart"-- lack Dilla's knack for immaculate drum programming and thick, rich bass. (The first time I heard "The People" was in a taxi with the windows slightly cracked, and once we hit the freeway all I could hear under the wind was a weak snare shot.) It doesn't help that the inclusion of a genuine Jay Dee beat on the album-- the lush "So Far to Go," which already appeared on last year's Dilla elegy The Shining with different lyrics-- makes Kanye's shit sound even more ersatz.
It could just be a matter of an album needing the right audience: Its over-earnest soul-rap production and righteous indignation might strike a nerve with anyone who's under the impression that "real rap" needs to be saved from some evil influence (like, I don't know, Southern tracks with hooks or whatever). The problem is, Common already brought this "real" hip hop back two years ago, and by presenting a weaker, more frivolous and significantly duller version of it, he's risking falling into the same routine of formulaic coasting as the white-tee strawmen older heads gripe about. Call it Be Minus, and let me know when he's found his spark again.
